Last night’s episode of Mad Men could have only been topped if the whole gang attended a wedding where Joan was to be married to a partner at Gray, only to be ambushed and slaughtered by a battalion of Gray copywriters in the name of J Walter Thompson resulting in Don and Joan’s death.

Instead Don Draper, after helping his neighbor’s son avoid a court martial, slept with his neighbor’s wife in front of the all-too-mature eyes of his daughter. When we catch up with Don this week, we quickly learn that Sally has kept quiet, albeit by avoiding Don and Megan all together.

Sometimes it seems like there’s a breed of writer that the current literary world just doesn’t engender anymore. The kind of writer I’m referring to is the type that many of us clung to when we began channeling aspirations that we ourselves could one day be writers. For those of us that didn’t grow up loving books from the start — those of us who, in school, only sunk our teeth into the Orwells or the Huxleys or the writers that seemed a little bit angry, a little bit smarmy, and (though highly intelligent) still seemed charged by a certain youthful energy — these writers are crucial. Somehow inherent in the notion of the intellectual is a sense of defeat, a jaded sense of inexcitability. There’s a lot of it floating around in the literary atmosphere. When we come a across a writer who tells a great story with emotional intention and sagacity, yet is charged with youthful energy and will without being devoid of earnestness, we must stop and give them our attention. There may be a lot of writers in this day and age, but there are not a lot of writers like Joshua Mohr.

If you’ve ever been told that your C in 3rd grade Social Studies isn’t going to look good on a college application, you probably have some sense of how accelerated the private school world can be. Yet, in New York City, where everything is inherently accelerated, the private school system can be even worse. Bronwen Hruska’s novel Accelerated (Pegasus) follows a newly single father, Sean Benning as he juggles his kid’s private school, his job at a gossip rag, and his aspirations as an artist. Sean must fit in with the parental elite, get in the good graces of the teachers, and resist the school’s tendency to overmedicate their students. However, when the schools “recommendations” that Sean medicate his son Toby turn aggressive, a dark and ominous picture comes into focus.

On August 29th, the Other People Podcast will run its 100th episode. Host Brad Listi is an author and the founder of The Nervous Breakdown. His show stands out from book talk media outlets both in content and tone, and Listi’s interview style tends to be more candid, personal and often bold than the rest.

I caught up with Listi to talk about his favorite moments from the show so far, and about what writers are really like.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, written by Stephen Chbosky, successfully bridged the young adult to adult literature gap in a way that few have. The film version of the book is now being slated for release in September, well over a decade after the fact. The film is set to star Paul Rudd, Mae Whitman and Emma Watson, and is being produced by the team behind Juno. It is being adapted and directed by Chbosky.

Big Day Coming is the new book by music journalist/WFMU DJ Jesse Jarnow that tells the story of indie rock as it evolves through the lifespan of Yo La Tengo. Jarnow paints a picture not only of a band’s lifespan or of a genre’s inception, but of multiple decades of rock n roll history, music journalism, and the city of Hoboken, New Jersey. Yo La Tengo, being a band so inextricable from their home venue, Maxwell’s in Hoboken, the place is treated almost like a character in Big Day Coming in a way that’s comparable to the role of CBGB’s in Please Kill Me. In the end, Big Day Coming is structured like a web of different and disparate subjects, woven around the genre of indie rock, and especially YLT.

I sat down with Jesse to find out what exactly indie rock is and why Yo La Tengo was the best band through which to tell its story.

As Andrew Jackson Jihad, Sean Bonnette (with partner Ben Gallaty) exists in a unique realm of decidedly punk rock musicianhood. With each consecutive album, the band manages to gain slightly more attention from the larger independent music listening world. AJJ is known for their bare bones, agressive folk sound that utilizes acoustic guitar and upright bass, but also with each conescutive release, they’ve began incorporating horns, more strings and even on the last record, Knife Man, kazoos. Most immediately striking about AJJ is Bonnette’s brutal, unbridled and unhinged vocal style along with their catchy yet hellishly dark lyrics that definitely draws influence from literature.

One thing I love about Andrew Jackson Jihad is a certain nakedness in the lyrics and performance, like there’s nothing to hide behind. Would you say that that’s been a running thing through the music you’ve always responded to?

Yeah, I think so. Although I do also like artists that write through a character or don’t write about their lives directly. Like John Darnielle, like that album Tallahassee is entirely fiction. Nick Cave writes through characters a lot I imagine. I used to write songs a lot more guarded. Our first record has a lot more silly songs. Most of those songs weren’t really based in truth except for maybe the feelings behind them, I think that was my experiment in trying to write fiction.

When David Cronenberg turned William Burroughs’s masterwork Naked Lunch into a somewhat linear, entertaining narrative, literary fans everywhere were pleasantly, if not resentfully surprised. Cronenberg, in doing so, proved himself not only a master storyteller, but able to do something that few directors could, adapt dense, postmodern classic novels into solid films. On the other hand, when director Gary Walkow attempted to turn William Burroughs’s seminal novel Queer into a film by combining it with the story of Burroughs’s wife’s murder, along with the completely unrelated murder David Kammerer in 1944 by writer Lucien Carr, the product was 2003’s Beat, perhaps the worst in a long line of attempts to adapt Beat novels into films. Walkow attempted to use Cronenberg’s trick of combining Burroughs’s tendency toward psychdelic fantasy with his own personal story as an author, but in doing so he obscured the novel’s story entirely. The result is one of our best examples of what happens when good novels are poorly adapted for the screen. (Note: Beat doesn’t officially purport to be an adaptation of Queer.)